I’ve never really loved smartwatches. That might sound odd coming from someone who reviews the best smartwatches for a living, but it’s true. I appreciate what they do. I just don’t enjoy wearing them.
Give me a mechanical watch any day. They’re timeless, they don’t nag you, and they don’t feel obsolete after three years. Strap one on, and it’ll still look good in a decade. A smartwatch, on the other hand, always feels temporary. Useful? Yes. Permanent? No.
And yet. The health and fitness side of smartwatches is genuinely brilliant. Steps, sleep, recovery, heart rate, all of it can be genuinely helpful if you’re paying attention. That’s why I’ve tried to make them work.
This year alone, I’ve reviewed some excellent ones, from the Google Pixel Watch 4 to the TAG Heuer Connected E5. The hardware is polished, the software is slick, and they come with genuinely lifesaving features. I liked them all. I just never kept them on for long.
Then I started wearing a smart ring.
Why a ring works when a watch doesn’t
The big difference is simple: I forget I’m wearing it. That’s the whole point.
A smartwatch is always there. On your wrist. Lighting up. Buzzing. Asking for attention. Even when notifications are off, the screen is still a screen. It subtly changes how you interact with time, and with your phone.
A smart ring just… sits there. There’s no display and no distractions. It quietly collects data in the background while you wear the watch you actually want to wear. That balance is what finally made health tracking stick for me.
I’ve been wearing the Luna Ring for a while now, and the insights have been genuinely useful rather than interesting-for-a-week useful.
Living with the Luna Ring
The Luna Ring is built around the idea that health tracking should fit into your life, not take it over. It’s designed to be worn 24 hours a day, and it’s comfortable enough that you don’t think about it once it’s on.
Battery life is pretty good as well. You get up to five days on a single charge, which means you’re not constantly planning charging windows or waking up to a dead device. You charge it, put it back on, and forget about it again.
What matters more than the hardware, though, is the data. Luna focuses on readiness, sleep and activity, the three things most people actually want to understand.
The sleep score runs from 0 to 100 and looks at more than just how long you were in bed. Duration, efficiency, restfulness, REM and deep sleep all feed into it. You also get nighttime movement tracking, which breaks your sleep into low, medium and high-intensity movement. It’s a subtle way of spotting restlessness or patterns you’d otherwise miss.
On the activity side, the Activity Score gives you a clear sense of how you’re balancing movement, workouts and rest. Again, it’s scored out of 100, and it factors in things like training frequency and volume, not just raw step counts.
The activity goal adapts to you too, based on your height, weight, age and gender, then tracks your active calorie burn throughout the day. It’s not shouting “close your rings” at you. It does quietly nudge you to be more active.
The app makes all the difference
This is where smart rings either work or fall apart. The Luna app is well designed, easy to navigate, and, crucially, it talks like a human.
Instead of drowning you in charts and raw numbers, it explains what’s going on in plain language. What your sleep means. Why your readiness might be lower today. When you should push, and when you should probably take it easy.
Tracking accuracy is good enough for me, and that’s the key phrase. If you’re training for a marathon or need to know your heart rate zones, you’ll probably still want a fitness watch. I’m not doing that, so I’m happy with a smart ring.
A slimmer ring, same philosophy
Recently, I’ve swapped the Luna Ring for the Ultrahuman Ring Air. The main reason is comfort. The Ring Air is slimmer, lighter, and easier to forget about, which matters when you’re wearing something 24 hours a day.
It’s too early to say which I prefer overall. Both follow the same philosophy, and both do it well. What I do know is this: the switch hasn’t tempted me back to a smartwatch. That door’s closed.
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